


Keeping faith

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Captivity, Cassian is absent in chapter one, Childbirth, Davits Draven is not a dick, F/M, Fear, Guilt, Psychological Trauma, Unplanned Pregnancy, battle of Hoth and aftermath, believing you have nothing to live for, rumours of horrible things done to infants, such as forced adoption and worse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-12 12:19:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11161710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: Jyn feels the faint, numbed-down throbbing of bacta’d wounds healing, and the woolly-headed calm of heavy analgesia.  She’s alive and has been treated for her injuries, but something is wrong nonetheless.





	1. Chapter 1

“Where am I?”

“Hush, don’t exert yourself.   You’re safe now.”  It’s a firm voice, but kind, and almost professionally soothing.  And Coruscanti.

“Where am I?” Jyn asks again weakly.  She aches all over and her eyes show her nothing but a blur of light and dark.  Something is terribly wrong.

She was hurt in the assault, she remembers.  She’d been hit by shrapnel, then by a falling roof panel; she’d struggled out of the burning hangar onto the ice and her vision was blurring with pain already as she got into the open.  All around her there were rushing shadow figures; she couldn’t tell who were the enemy, who were friends, they all ran together like ripples, indistinct and unreadable.  The gunfire was louder than hell’s own choir screaming, and Jyn couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t think.  She remembers shouting desperately; “There are people inside still, hold your fire, hold your fire!”  Then an energy bolt struck her and every nerve in her body seemed to shrivel into agony, and she had lost consciousness. 

But she’s talking, now, so she must still be alive.

She feels the faint, numbed-down throbbing of bacta’d wounds healing, and the woolly-headed calm of heavy analgesia.  She’s alive and has been treated for her injuries, but something is wrong nonetheless.

“Do you remember how you got here?” says the kindly voice.  “Can you tell me your name?”

Jyn blinks, trying to focus on the white smudge of a face above her.  A human medic; the damage must have been pretty bad, then.  “I was – wounded?” she hazards carefully. “In the attack?”  She avoids the question about her name.  That can wait, until she knows where she is and who this is speaking to her, and why they want to know.  Why they don’t know already.

“That’s right.  You were injured as you escaped.  But you’ve been rescued, that’s the important thing.  You’re safe now and among friends.”

Rescued?  From what? – from who?  She’d been _with_ friends, with all her friends and comrades, she didn’t need to be rescued.  Does this man mean she was rescued from the attack?  It’s an odd choice of word if so. 

“Where am I?” she demands again.

“You’re aboard the Imperial Hospital Ship _Grey dove_.  I know you’ve had a traumatic experience, but you’re safe now.”

“Imperial – _hospital ship_?”  Force alive, no, that’s not good at all…

“That’s right.  Do you remember when you were captured?”

_Captured?  They think I was a prisoner?_

 Jyn wrestles foggily with the problem.  She hadn’t been wearing fatigues; she was in her sleeping clothes when the assault began.  She’d called out to figures she could barely see, and she realises with horror now that they must have been Imperials.  Had someone recognised her accent?  Civilian clothes and a Coruscant accent; was that really all it took to be classified as a prisoner of the rebels?

That would explain why she’s being treated properly on an Imperial ship, rather than being left crying with pain in a cell somewhere.

She shifts her head on the pillow fretfully.  Got to play along somehow.  “When I was?…  It’s been a while, I – I’m not sure.  Months.  I lost track.  Am I going to be okay?”

“Your injuries have responded well to bacta.  You’re mildly malnourished but otherwise in good health.  I realise it must be very hard to believe that you’re safe now.  After a trauma like this it’s quite normal to feel very shaken, to doubt your friends, wonder if this can be real.  But you have to trust us.  We can help you.  You’re among friends now.  If you’d just tell me your name then we can begin the process of tracing your family.  You can go home.”

“My family are dead.”  No need to play-act for that, her voice shades to misery without the smallest effort.

“Is there anyone you’d like me to contact?  I’m sure your friends will be glad to hear you’re safe.”

It could so easily be a trap; drug her to deaden her mental faculties, lull her with this soothing talk about wanting to help.  Analyse everything she says to see what she gives away.  She has to keep faith that she can get through this without betraying anyone; faith too that she’ll get out, somehow.  Back to her _real_ friends.

“Please trust me,” says the doctor.  “I’m a psychologist, I promise you anything you say to me will be strictly confidential.  Please have faith in me; please tell me your name, so that I can help you.”

The blur of her vision is clearing gradually, though the ache in her side grows as the painkillers start to wear off.  She can see that the doctor is middle-aged and pale-skinned, and pale-eyed.  A cool face, neither friendly nor unfriendly; a professional face.  Like a spy.  Like Cassian, with that perfect expression of detachment, that trained neutrality.

Don’t think about Cassian. Did he survive the attack, did he get away, where is he?  Is anyone looking for her?  Was anyone else taken prisoner?  No, don’t think about him, don’t think about anyone.  Keep the faith, give nothing away.  This is a trap, it’s a trap, it has to be.

The inner voice saying _A trap, is this a trap?_ is hoarse and frantic; it’s Saw’s voice, the internalised voice of his paranoia.  She knows that and is frightened by what it tells her about herself these days.

But even if this is not a new technique of interrogation, she knows she can’t tell this efficiently-kind Imperial who she is; can’t tell even the smallest fraction of her truth, here. 

“There’s no-one.”  She forces her face into quiet, her voice into the dull flatness of a trauma victim disassociating.  “Where are we going?  The ship – what’s its heading?”

“Corulag.  You’ll be safe there.  You’re safe here.  They can’t come and get you anymore.”

“Thanks…”

“I’ll leave you to rest…”

But just a few hours later it all starts again; the same gentle refrain “Please trust me.”  It’s very hard not to believe the paranoid idea that this is some new trick, when they keep hammering away like this.  “I’ll be here when you feel ready to talk,” says the doctor soothingly.  “Captivity can be a deeply disorienting experience, and if the imprisonment has gone on too long many people find adjusting to being free again can be almost as bad.  You’ve endured things most of us never have to go through, it’s natural to find the aftermath difficult, painful.”

“I’m okay.  I’ll be okay, I can cope.”  She doesn’t want to say more.  She’s still trying to work out how much she can risk, and whether they really do think she’s just a traumatised ex-prisoner of the rebels.  “Just give me time, yeah?”

“Of course.  I understand.  But - there is one other thing.  It’s a delicate matter, I hesitate to mention it but in the circumstances I felt it best to let you know promptly.  It might be useful for you to know that –“ Dr Barrathy coughs awkwardly, a forced sound signalling embarrassment – “to know that the Imperial Medical Service has a no-questions-asked policy, if a – if a female patient requests a termination.”

Jyn tries to process that, and its implications.  It makes so little sense she feels as though her brain has sunk back into the analgesic fog. “What do you mean?”

“There are some powerful voices in favour of demanding documentary evidence of rape before allowing the procedure.  But so far we’ve resisted these political influences.  So, if you decide not to proceed with the pregnancy –“

“I’m pregnant?” Jyn stutters.

“Did you not realise?  Yes.  Of course, as you’re still in your first trimester the procedure would be simple and non-invasive at this stage.”

“No.”  It would be different if she really had been a violated captive.  But if she’s pregnant there’s only one thing that can mean.  And if Cassian didn’t survive the assault…  She can't think that, can't let herself contemplate the idea, the nightmare, of that loss.  She has to keep faith.  But she also can't sit here in this comfortable med-bay bed and pretend she would consider this even for one moment.  She simply can’t.  Not in these circumstances.  If it means she gives herself away, then she’ll be damned for it.  “No, I want to keep the baby.”

“Ah, yes, fine.  If you’re sure.  There’s still time, if you do change your mind.”  The startled tone doesn’t sound like an interrogator; but then would she know anyway?  But this is one risk she can’t take, if she’s carrying a child.

“I want this baby.” Jyn thinks hard, trying to untangle a way through the knots of her situation. “I’m sorry I’ve been so dense.  I’m tired and scared, you’re right, it’s been a terrifying few months, I don’t know who I can trust anymore.  The painkillers don’t help, I feel as if my head’s full of dough.  I was - I was held with my husband at first but then he was transferred, I don’t know where they took him.  I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again.  This is all so scary.  I can’t think straight…”  She lets her voice slither into a pathetic panicked tone.  She knows the Alliance monitors Imperial channels constantly.  If she can send a message somehow, maybe someone will pick up on it…  “My name, you wanted my name?  My name is Cassiana Hallik.  My husband’s name is Lianno.  If anyone can find him, even just find out what’s happened to him; if there’s anything you can do to trace him, I – I don’t know how to thank you if you can help me find him…”

The doctor looks cool and thoughtful; unconvinced, maybe, or just professionally masked.  “I’ll see what we can do.  And in the meantime I’ll make you an appointment with one of our ob-gyn team.  And you need to start getting a better diet.  That vat-grown stodge they were feeding you is far too low in protein for an expectant mother.”

**

Even after she accepts that this was not some tortuous new form of subtle interrogation, Jyn can’t relax for long.  It looks for a time as though she may pull it off, impersonating a traumatised former prisoner missing her husband.  But by the time the ship reaches Corulag her debriefings with Dr Barrathy have changed in tone.  Her story doesn’t add up, and Jyn is not entirely surprised when she finds herself taken into custody and transferred from the comforts of the _Grey dove_ to a cell on a transport ship.

Even now it’s clear they don’t really know what to make of her.  Strange to think she thought at first that this was all some subtle, complex game to get her to give herself away.  It’s nothing so intelligent.  They can’t figure her out, but no-one has the complexity of mind to imagine the true story here. 

In her last discussion with him, Dr Barrathy had suggested that perhaps a mental instability has led her to bond with her captors, to seek protection by submerging herself under an assumed sympathy for their ideals; it’s a known syndrome, in kidnapping cases, he said sadly.  He’d told her he hoped to get her assigned for further treatment, to try and undo the effects of what was obviously a form of emotional collapse.

But it appears he was over-optimistic.  Her accent may accord ill with her suspicious views, but in the end the Empire will always hit first and offer bandages after.  Jyn is sent to a women’s prison on Einithion, remanded as a suspected rebel sympathiser.

If there are still any messages out there seeking to reunite Lianno Hallik with his wife Cassiana, she will have to hope they are heard by someone, somewhere, sometime.  But she may never know.

She just has to keep the faith, and not give up hope.  Hope is all she has.

As a pregnant inmate Jyn is at least spared heavy labouring tasks.  It’s a working prison, like most of them.  The main business is a textile mill.  She operates a loom in one of the many weaving sheds until her swollen body starts getting in the way, then finds herself assigned to sorting and bagging balls of newly-dyed thread.  It’s monotonous, to the point of screaming, but it’s indoor work and she can sit down for long periods of time.  She could have worse work details.

There are apparently very few pregnant prisoners ever; right now she’s the only one.  Everyone knows the fate of infants born in prison.  They are taken.  Everyone knows, and no-one does, what happens next.  The rumours vary from the practical (babies for adoption, quick and clean and dirt cheap) to nightmarish (fodder for raising to be Stormtroopers, sex-slaves, or worse).  The unknown is always a source of terror.  Yet despite the fear, the mutterings that pass for knowledge, Jyn’s belly becomes a kind of talisman, a mascot patted hopefully in passing by lonely females of every species in the jail.  It’s as if her unborn child embodies all of their dreams of freedom, all of their hopes for a day without bars on the windows and bucket-heads at the doors.

Jyn dreams of freedom too.  Dreams of heavy work-shifts slogged through in good company, building Echo Base; of counting the X-wings out and back from a mission; of going running with Cassian, their regular morning exercise regime, pounding through the icy corridors, or of waking up beside him, rolling over in his arms, their breath fogging together urgently and tenderly.  Of riding out on patrol, muffled to the eyes in a snug parka and thick snow-gear; scanning the huge whiteness of the horizon at night, staring at the glittering monochrome of the black heavens and the snowy vastness below them, where she and Cassian and their animals are the only things moving bar a shooting star…

She goes into labour in the middle of a shift.  She pants her way through the early stages for a couple of hours, completes her work and is then escorted, lurching slightly with effort, to the medical wing of the prison.  Where she is left alone to get on with it; with one ankle cuffed to the foot of her bed.  A nurse inspects her, declares her hours off yet, and leaves.

She dimly remembers Dr Barrathy talking about her decision and saying how brave she was.  What did he know? – well-meaning detached professional.  She’ll never see him again, that’s certain.  But brave, yes, she certainly needs to be brave now.

All the way through the hideously protracted business of birthing her child, the nurse checks her from time to time.  Otherwise the attention is minimal, pain relief non-existent.  She pants, yells, endures, bleeds.  Waits for the process to take its natural course.  Above all, in every moment of lucidity between contractions, she prays for a daughter.  They might let her keep a daughter, it is a women’s prison after all.  A son, she dreads and knows, will be taken from her. 

But probably a daughter will be taken just the same.  She cries and screams with the effort and the pain, and the despair of bringing her and Cassian’s child into life in this place.  It feels as though her body is splitting itself in two; as though she is expelling her own heart, pushing all the hope in herself out slowly, torturously slowly, inch by tearing, crushing, screaming inch.

At last, exhausted and weeping, she heaves herself up to gather her infant off the bloody sheeting between her legs.  The cord is blue, pulled taut now and vanishing back inside her, as if straight to her guts; but the child is alive and crying furiously.  It’s a boy.

Jyn’s understanding of the world realigns itself at the sight of his tiny body, all kicking limbs and bawling face, at the sound of his absolute, undeniable life.  She loves Cassian, loves her friends, has come to love the cause and to think of Echo Base as home.  She still dreams of them all.  But this is something on another level.  This is love like the heart of a star, a power that consumes and illuminates everything else in her life.

She’s alone, and she’s no longer alone, ever again.  Less than an hour ago the dismissive nurse had announced her not yet dilated enough; and here’s her son, warm and alive, in her arms.  He has a shock of wet dark hair and a pointed chin; his eyes are deep brown.  She looks into them and sees the clarity of brown agate, and tiny speckles of gold.  His father’s eyes, and her stardust in them.

She delivers herself of the afterbirth when another set of contractions come.  When the nurse next comes round she is sitting up, with her bosom bared and the child held close.  Blood and birth fluid have smeared from his skin to hers.  She probably looks like something out of a ghost story.  The were-mother and her gore-baby.  She’s giddy and shaking with exhaustion and it seems hilarious to be facing this ill-tempered medical functionary and saying “Well, it started, so I went with it, you know?”  Seeing the woman’s face shift to a grudging kind of acceptance.

He’s sleeping; her son and Cassian’s.  She keeps him pressed to her skin.  His breath is a tiny fluttering of sound, the beat of an insect’s wings is no louder.

The beat of an insect’s wings, Jyn thinks, can trigger a hurricane.

Nameless and in danger her son sleeps. 

“Don’t fall in love with it,” the nurse says, sharpish but not unkind.  “It’ll be taken within the week, that’s the system. Best to be prepared, don’t break your heart over this.”

Jyn shakes her head.  “His name is Jeron and nobody is taking him from me.”

The nurse sighs wearily.  She’s heard it a dozen times, or a hundred.  There’s even a shadow of something like pity in her eyes.

But as it turns out, Jyn is right.

History will record the date of the Battle of Endor; Jeron Andor will grow up knowing it as his birthday.  The liberation of Einithion begins with an uprising on the southern continent, as the news of this massive defeat of Imperial forces arrives.  The uprising spreads like a chain reaction; by the time Jeron is two days old, a rebel vanguard has made landfall at the northern capital of Corsolina to offer support, and the people of occupied Einithion are rising everywhere.  The Corsolina garrison holds out for another two days before surrendering.

The prison explodes in riots.  More than half the inmates are political prisoners; a few, like Jyn, are even POWs.  On the fifth day of her son’s life Jyn finds herself issuing orders, marshalling confusion into organised resistance; striding out of a broken door at the head of a hundred other females, armed with the weapons they took from their outnumbered guards. 

She’s still recovering from the birth; her body aches and bleeds and leaks, though the prison has fallen without a fight she is torn and bruised as if from battle.  But Jeron sleeps in an improvised sling against her breasts, and she has a blaster in one hand and a stolen truncheon in the other.  The women who’d patted her swollen belly for luck now gather to her as though to a five star general.  She kept the faith, and so did they.

The prisoners walk out into freedom.

 


	2. Chapter 2

_There are one thousand, two hundred and fifty three passenger places on a GR-75 retrofitted for personnel transportation, plus a hundred and twenty-nine crew.  In the event of an emergency base evacuation it is crucial that every one of those seats is occupied; that no space is wasted that could have been used to save a life.  Your job in that eventuality is running comms; you will also be coordinating manifests to ensure all our ships are loaded to capacity._

_Yes, sir._

_Major Huon will now take you through the registration system for logging individuals as having boarded._

In between missions in the field he’d been assigned to comms duty.  Simple, easy work; it could even be called restful, since it was done sitting down.  A chance to rest his sore muscles and take the stress off his spine; and it kept his language skills honed, and his ear for listening-in and picking up detail from the blurry sound quality of tapped transmissions. 

Jyn worked in the training corps, pounding the slippery floors of Echo Base’s ice-hall gym, passing on her fighting skills to newcomers.  Sometimes when he got the chance he would go along at the end of a shift, just to sit and watch.

It was a delight and a fascination still, seeing her take down some unsuspecting recruit.  Heavily-built, muscular beings who stared at their new instructor and then squared up to her with a grin, only to lurch away minutes later, gaping and bruised and out of breath.  He’d analysed, but had yet to replicate, her prowess; he suspected in the end she would always be a better hand-to-hand fighter than him. 

It was still just as huge a turn-on as it had been the first time he’d seen her in action.  His baton-wielding bad-ass, his Jyn.

_Each individual tags themselves in on the system as soon as they board, or marks themselves as on another evac if necessary; you will be monitoring those tags and maintaining a running list of personnel who have not yet tagged-in.  It’s a bit ad-hoc, it’s not an ideal system, but it’s low-tech and portable and it’s the best we can come up with right now when resources are so stretched.  Using this we can keep track of numbers on board each ship, and it gives us a baseline to start from if we need to verify casualties subsequently._

_Yes, sir._

He was almost at the end of a shift; peacefully transcribing data about Imperial fleet movements.  Jyn had been doing night-time training exercises all week, and he’d left her curled on her side in bed that morning, her hair tangled over her face, eyelids shadowed, lips relaxed in the cool light.  He’d just been joking about getting back to quarters in time for the evening meal and finding her not awake yet when it began.  All the lights flickered in the comms bunker and went out.  Powder-frost showered down from a ruptured conduit overhead as a series of huge explosions rocked the base. 

Someone yelled in panic a few rooms over and a klaxon began to blare. 

In the bunker, manned with Intelligence staff like him on layover between missions, there was a single moment of breathless silence.  Then everyone went to work.  Unhesitating and orderly they made their way to their stations. 

They’d planned and drilled for this eventuality.  There was nothing to save, here; all intel of value was stored in back-up files and uploaded to data stores on the Mon Cala flagship _Home One_.  In an attack each member of the team had a role to play, in fighting units, ground support, engineering...

Cassian knew he’d never see some of them again.

_As you know, Intelligence always runs logistical support in evacuations.  It uses a comparable skill set; you people are trained in rapid reaction and thinking on your feet, you’re cool under fire, prepared to take decisions in the field, you’re used to monitoring multiple aspects of a situation simultaneously.  In an emergency evac, Captain Andor, your station will be aboard one of the transports…_

Cassian found himself hunched over another comm desk, relaying instructions and counting smaller ships clear, keeping one eye on the steady stream of names tagging themselves as on board or otherwise safe.  The base’s main ion cannon had begun to fire, each blast it let off shaking the ice plateau itself.  He was near enough to a viewport to see fighter craft bucketing past, and tracer fire burning gold against the white sky.

_Tola Ambs >aboard< \- Tharel Lamm’Neebo >aboard< -  Rapinder Menlek >aboard< -  Deph Haskane >otherwise safe< -_

Abruptly the ship got the go-ahead to take off.  The ion cannon boomed again as the engines roared into life.  The scrolling list juddered to a stop.

Less than an hour later they were deep in the black, sweeping through hyperspace, and he was tracking and relaying crackling signals from the rest of the fleet .  

Most of them had got out safe, but there were losses, some of them grave, and missing vessels.  The next stage of evac logistics was going through manifests, checking names against that running tag system, to catalogue as much data as possible, as fast as possible, on who’d made it, who hadn’t.

_Menasta Lokkaban, Linc Lappio, Vidian Medina, Hosay Diaz, Pliv Permantoan, Brightly Samos, Jon Bethel, Drik Weenoka…_

The lists of names ran on and on; who was safe, who was a confirmed casualty, who was missing. 

It never occurred to him that Jyn might be in either of the latter categories.  Until he knew she was.

**

He would have tried to go back for her, he tells himself, staring into the blue drift of hyperspace without seeing it.  He would have gone back, if he’d known; he would have, he would have... 

But he hadn’t known.  He hadn’t known anything.

After three and a half years of constant companionship, of a unity of mind so fathomless they joked about being telepathically linked like Jedi, he’d failed to be there for her; failed to keep faith with her, failed to go back for her, failed, failed.  The one time he’d assumed she would be fine – that she’d be woken by the alert, would pull on her boots and follow procedure – and now he has no idea what had happened to her. 

He’s failed her utterly; after all his promises, all his pledges to be her home…

He’s wide awake; has been, ever since the escape from Hoth.  More than a week now.  Time spent just sitting, unsleeping, dwelling in his nightmare.  Sitting at his station, working mindlessly, sitting on his bunk staring at the hull plating, sitting by a viewport staring at the nothingness outside.  It’s puzzling, in an unimportant way, that he hasn’t yet reached the point of collapse. 

All he can see, all he can think, is failure.  He was so busy doing his job, and that one name on the system that he should have sought and cherished and fought-for, that one most precious name had been there all along with no tag beside it, just an empty slot, flashing green for unknown.  _Jyn Erso >status unknown< \- Jyn Erso >status unknown< -_

On the eighth day, one of his mess-mates finds him curled in a ball on the deck, in the empty dorm.  He’s holding his head, shaking silently as if the cold of Hoth has come after him through the hyperspace lanes and eaten into his skeleton.

The med-bay can do little for emotional trauma cases at the best of times.  Now, already packed with seriously injured personnel, there’s nothing the med droids can offer except to dose him with heavy sedatives and send him to quarters with the order to rest. 

He gets as far as sitting down again before the drugs kick in and he slides off the edge of the bunk and blacks out in a heap on the floor. 

The next day he takes the same dose and manages to get onto his bunk and lie down before passing out.  But that’s as good as it gets.  There is no hope, and so, no way past this, and no way through.  It just **is** ; the slab of despair, planted on his life like a gravestone.

Weeks pass.  Cassian refuses a leave of absence, remains in Comms, on indefinite secondment from Intelligence.  He takes his shifts, does his work, swallows his pills and sleeps the sleep of the drugged.  Wakes at the beginning of each rotation, takes a low-dose prescription stim, goes back to work.

He is dead, really, he thinks, as dead as anyone lying frozen in the ruins behind them (as dead perhaps as Jyn; he sees her hair spread out on the ice, long strands frozen across her face, and frost crystals drifting down into them, and her eyes wide open like his own).  There’s nothing anymore to stay alive for.  He’ll make what use he can of his continued physical existence by sitting obediently at a desk, logging and relaying signals.  But he’ll never be able to go into the field again. 

Even if she is dead, he should still have brought her home.

**

“Captain, a word.”  Davits Draven touches his sleeve in passing and he stops dead in the gangway.  He hasn’t seen Draven since the evacuation.  Since – since -

Get a grip on yourself.  “Yes sir.”

“At ease, Captain.”

“Yes sir.”

There’s a long cold pause while Draven stares at him and then at the wall of the corridor, as if looking for words printed there.  Finally he says “I saw your request to take part in the recovery operation.  Your choice of wording was – unusual.”

“Sir?”

“Oh for the love of life, Andor, _at ease_!  Why do you want to go back to Hoth?  I don’t understand why you could possibly want to return to – well, to return there.”

Cassian stands numbly waiting for the General to carry on speaking.  He does want to get a grip, he truly does, but he really can’t find the words to answer; not like this, just standing in a passageway, impromptu.  He worked for hours on that posting request, trying to sound professional and make a logical case.  He has no idea what this reference to “unusual wording” is about.

His mind is grey, like the ice of his long-ago home.  Gripping on to ice is a doomed task.

He’s beginning to wonder how much longer he can go on like this.

Draven does not continue speaking.  He meets Cassian’s eyes and his lips tighten to a thin line, thinner even than usual, and he waits.

Cassian says at last “I made a mistake.”

“Does that mean you’ve changed your mind about wanting to go?”

“No, sir.  Not that.  A – a mistake…”  He can’t go on.  He can see it all, the enormity of it, but explaining it would be like trying to bring a thundercloud inside the ship just by the power of words, and he can’t find words, he just can’t...

Draven sighs.  “Well.  Who gets to go back to Hoth isn’t my decision.  Perhaps that’s just as well.  In the meantime I’m extending your temporary re-assignment to the Signals and Comms team, as per your second request.  But I wanted to tell you in person that there will still be a place for you in Intelligence, whenever you do decide you are ready to return.  You were one of our best.  When you’re fit for field work again, I want you to know you can come back.  It doesn’t matter if it’s months.  A year, even.”

“Thank you, sir,” would seem to be the appropriate thing to say.  But it doesn’t feel right.  “May I be frank, sir?”

“Yes.”  Draven looks ill-at-ease with the clipped assent he’s just given.  But he has given it.  Cassian grabs at the one thing he feels able to say.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to return to Intelligence, sir.  Least of all to working in the field.”

“You were one of our best,” the General says again.  “I can wait.  Take as long as you need to get back to par.”

“Thank you, sir.  Nonetheless.”

There’s a long silence; Cassian stands rigid with his hands clasped behind his back, waiting to be dismissed. 

“I realise,” Draven says slowly “That it would be pointless for me to push you for reasons and explanations you are clearly unable to give.  I am aware that you’ve been under medical supervision since Hoth.  Losing someone you care about in circumstances like these is – traumatic.  I do have some idea what you’re going through.”

Out of nothing, out of nowhere, for a fraction of a second Cassian feels sheer rage heat him.  He breathes fast, his nostrils flare on a single inhalation and exhalation before he controls himself and commands his face to impassivity again.  Tells himself it doesn’t matter; and he looks through the wall, at the base of the vertical hull plating behind Draven and fifty metres back.  Goes numb, empty, grey. 

“Cassian.”

Reluctantly he hears the sound.  Not _Captain_ or _Andor_ but his given name.  He’s not sure how many seconds have passed.  He comes back into himself.  “Sir?”

“We have to work alone, in this field.  We tell ourselves that, we build our armour and carry it with us.  But doing the kind of work we do, it kills, it starves something in you.  So you decide to take the risk; have a friendship or two, maybe risk a relationship; stop being so isolated.  Tell yourself it can be done, you can do it.  We’ve all done it.  I did it.  I did it twice.”

The repeated iterations of _do, done, did, did_ make a pattern, are almost a kind of poetry; but he blinks and realises what’s just been said.  It’s an unbending beyond anything he’s known from Davits Draven in more than fifteen years.

“Sir?”

A faint mirthless breath escapes and the General says shortly “The first one left me and the second one died.  I learned my lesson.”  He looks at the deck for a moment, his mouth tightening over swallowed memories.  “But I don’t blame you for trying.  Your relationship with Sergeant Erso seemed to be strong.  It gave you a foundation you hadn’t had before.  Had me thinking, if anyone on my team could manage to make something like this work it would be you.”

“But I couldn’t.  Sir.  It was –“ He’d like to break down and curl up and clutch his head again, right here in this public place, sooner than have to say this; but such melodramatics are unacceptable.  He takes a deep breath, holds it for the count of four, looks for each word.  “I told myself the same thing.  That I could do both.  Make it work.  I could keep both commitments going.  I told myself I wouldn’t let either one slip, I cared too much about them both.  The rebellion, and – Jyn.  But then I didn’t follow through.  When the attack happened, I focussed on just one of my commitments and didn’t even think to look at the other; and I failed her.  I didn’t look.  I didn’t keep faith with her.  I wasn’t there.  Now she’s gone and I can never bring her back.”

“Officially she’s missing in action.”

“But she’s gone.  It was – it was an error of judgement.  Sir.  I should have quit after Scarif.  I should never have let myself believe I could handle both.  If I go back into the field, now, having to make decisions, having to trust my own judgement, I – it won’t work.  I can’t do it, sir.  I know now that my judgement is fallible.  It’s fallible at the most serious level.  If I can fail something so profoundly important to me, then I can fail anyone.   _Anything_.  I can fail the cause.  I can no longer trust myself in the field.”

Silence.  His shift is due to start in twenty minutes and he knows he needs to get something to eat in the mess first.  But all he wants is to go back to the dorm and take his pills, and sleep.  Turn off life for ten hours and not have to think about any of this.

Draven waits for Cassian to go on.  Says quietly, when he does not “I hope in time you will come to feel differently.”  His face is set, and sad.  “You will remain on secondment to Comms until you request a reassignment.  Thank you for your honesty, Captain Andor.  Dismissed.”

**

Cassian is not selected for the Hoth recovery mission.  But when he checks and rechecks the reports, afterwards, although some names from the old list of missing personnel have been updated, the name he’s looking for and then staring at, each time, remains the same.

_Mayim Veiba > confirmed deceased< \- Loïc Renaut > confirmed deceased< \- Panyot Remmus Lee > confirmed deceased<_

_Jyn Erso >status unknown< _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm inventing brazenly; I have no idea how many people you can really get on a GR-75, or what Intelligence operatives currently on base are assigned to do between field missions, or what kind of evacuation protocols and systems for tracking casualties the Alliance would have (though I'm sure they would have both). Apologies for any mis-use of military terms (I do not come from a Forces background, quite the opposite in fact; getting on for half my family are either Quakers or fellow-travellers).  
> Sorry this is so angsty!


	3. Chapter 3

_Jyn Erso >status unknown< _

_The message flickers on the comm screen of Rogue One and Bodhi Rook, long-dead, long grieved-for, turns to look at Cassian with an expression of shocked disbelief –_

_\- Officially she’s missing in action – Draven turns his back and walks away -_

_\- You didn’t come for me, she says sadly;_ _you weren’t there, you didn’t look for me, you never came back_ -

Her face is pale in his dream, her eyes shuttered and regretful.  It’s a strange thing about the dreams.  She’s never angry with him; it’s as though she doesn’t resent him for letting her down, and it makes no sense.  He has let her down so entirely; and Jyn was always so quick to laugh and say _Oi!_ and tell him jokingly he was out of line.

_\- You’ve still never come looking for me.  I miss you so much, Cassian -_

_He holds out shaking hands but she’s just out of reach, she’s on the other side of a crowd of dead-eyed men, she’s on the ramp of a Delta-class shuttle prepping for take-off without him, she’s walking away from him over the grey ice of Fest; looking back over her shoulder each time, but always, steadily, leaving…_

He wakes with a jolt and a pounding heart, sits up and strikes his head on the upper bunk.  A sleepy murmur of protest comes from above and he mumbles apologies.

It’s been thirteen numb, drugged weeks since the escape from Hoth.  He hates the dazed state he’s in but he has to get a night’s sleep to be functional enough to work at all, so he goes on taking the pills.  Lately they aren’t keeping him down all night; about one night in five he’ll be woken by bad dreams and struggle to get back to sleep.  He’s going to have to tell the med droid who renews the prescription, sooner or later.  Go onto a higher dose yet again, if there is one.

_You’ve still never come looking for me -_

It’s the first time she’s said that in his dreams.  Still never come looking…

Although he isn’t on shift again for another four hours, suddenly Cassian is on his feet and hurrying through the corridors of Home One with a jacket thrown over his sleep clothes.  He knows it’s pointless, this sudden idea; it’s hopeless after all this time.  He should have looked for her right at the start, and he’d been so broken he hadn’t done it; he had sat staring at the walls when he should have been out searching, 

To the Empire, Jyn was a known criminal. Her remains might conceivably have been identified, her demise noted, somewhere in their obsessive record keeping.

It’s a possibility so tenuous he could easily tell himself it isn’t worth trying. But he knows that now he’s thought of it, if he doesn’t do something to look even now, it will torture him for the rest of his life. 

The programming shouldn’t be difficult.  He runs through the sections of code he’ll need to use, the parameters to pick and the best way to combine them, the trigger protocols he’ll need to set up.  Knows exactly what to do by the time he reaches Comms.

“Captain Andor?” says the Sergeant on duty in the middle of this night rotation.  He stares at Cassian’s dusty bare feet, his pyjama pants and bed-head hair.  “Sir?”

“I know it’s not my shift.  Is there a free desk I can use?  It’s urgent.”

There’s a short pause before with an expression of careful neutrality the man points him to a position at the end of the room.  “Natreka just went on a break, his spot’s free for the next ten minutes or so, sir.”

“That’s all I need.”

He logs-in, enters the code strings he needs to do, sets up a trigger to ping him if there’s any response. 

Signaller First Class Natreka reappears from the direction of the heads.  He too stares. 

Cassian finishes his work, quits the position, gives a curt nod to the men on duty and leaves.

By the time he’s back in his bunk and turning on his data-pad, the impossible has happened.  There’s been a ping. 

He doesn’t know whether it will be any help, or just confirm his worst fears.  The date on the link is three months ago.  His hand quivers for a moment as he opens it.

He’d set parameters to screen any Imperial transmission they’ve tapped since Hoth, for Jyn’s real name and her various aliases.  There’s a hit on Hallik. 

Five days after the retreat from Hoth, a Dr J P Barrathy put a message on an official Imperial missing persons board, requesting any information on a Liann **o** Hallik, a Coruscanti civilian last heard of being held by rebel forces.  There’s a _please contact_ tag in the message, but it goes nowhere, the onward link has been severed.  So he can’t trace Dr Barrathy, or even discover where he worked, without further research.

Lianno Hallik. 

If it were just the family name he’d have to dismiss it, there are other people called Hallik after all.  But it’s a male form of the very same given name she’d gone by when they first met.  It’s too much coincidence.   There has to be a connection between Lianna Hallik and Lianno.  Hasn’t there?

Cassian’s hands are shaking so much he almost drops the data-pad; then he touches the words on the screen as though he were touching Jyn herself. 

She’s alive.  She’s alive, she has to be.

Or she was, three months ago.

**

“General Cracken –“

“I’m sorry, Captain.  I truly am.  But this intel is three months out of date and to call it tenuous is an understatement.  You’ve failed to find any corroborating evidence for your theory in any of the Imperial medical service records you’ve managed to hack.  You’ve been unable to trace any background data of any kind on the location of this Lianno Hallik, not even what sector the signal was sent from.  You have absolutely no leads and no guarantee this person is connected to Sergeant Erso.  The doctor who placed the original message is on an Imperial casualty list from Ryloth.  I’m sorry, but there is nothing here concrete enough to justify the resources a search mission in the field would take-up.” 

Cassian stands and hears what he must.  He takes a breath and then nods.  He’s unsure if acceptable words will come out if he tries to speak. 

The holo-link is clear, faintly bluish as always.  The Head of Alliance Intelligence looks impassively to his second-in-command standing at Cassian’s shoulder.  “General Draven, we’ll speak later.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, gentlemen.  Dismissed.”  He closes off the link without waiting for a response from them.

“I’m sorry,” Draven says into the silence.

“Thank you anyway, sir.”  He had agreed instantly to placing the call, and his support has felt like a life-buoy thrown into a sea of nothingness. 

Cassian still isn’t used to this, being able to express himself more freely to the General.  Things haven’t been like this between them in well over a decade.  But ever since that conversation in the passageway outside the mess hall - _I did it twice; the first one left me and the second one died…_

“I was pretty sure he’d say that.” 

“Yes, sir.  So was I.  But I had to try…” 

They walk together from the private briefing room into the long white passage outside, and along it, in silence.  When their paths separate, Draven hesitates.  He compresses his thin lips for a moment.  “Captain, there is one thing.  I must ask you – I must ask you not to repeat your – not to –“

“Sir? – oh.  Yes.  Of course, sir.”  Run?  Now?  Alone and months too late, and with no idea where to go?  He wants to weep with shame, but “I’m not going to go rogue,” he says quietly.

He feels slightly sick, saying it out loud like that.  But then he has felt slightly sick ever since the message appeared on his screen last night.  Sick with shock at first, and then with hope.  And for the first time since before the retreat, he’s both awake and conscious.  He can think.

Jyn could still be alive.  Almost a week after Hoth she _had_ been; she must have been, alive and trying to find a way to send them a message.  If he stole a ship and ran, he might spend the rest of his life tearing the galaxy apart hunting for her, and never find her.  Part of him would like to try it even so, but he has to accept that it would be a mistake.  He’ll keep looking for her; if there’s another crumb of evidence to be found anywhere, he’ll find it.  He’ll _find a way_ _to find it_ , he thinks.  He’ll keep faith that somewhere, somehow, she’s still out there. 

But he’ll search with the best tools he has; and however much the idea appeals, of breaking ranks and flying alone into the black to search till he drops, he knows it isn’t the best way. 

He will not indulge his emotions at the risk of failing her again.

“I know that there’s a better chance of finding out what happened to her if I stay here, where I have access to the technology to search Imperial channels steadily.”

Draven nods briskly.  “I’ll continue to sign-off on any further research or hacking you deem necessary.”

“Thank you, sir.”

**

In the aftermath of the Battle of Endor the Alliance is stretched more thinly than it has been in months.  There are uprisings on almost every occupied planet through the mid-rim; everywhere, resistance fighters, maquis, partisans of every kind, suddenly feeling the pull of real hope, the chance to free themselves from the now-headless Empire.  It’s chaos, and a dream. 

Troops are sent to every world they can be spared for, to engage and offer support, to coordinate, to help mop-up. 

Many of them are at the end of supply-lines stretched to breaking point.  They survive for days on little more than kaf; there’s a running joke about a spec ops sergeant who lives off blaster recharge packs because “who needs food when you’ve got pure energy right there in your ammo belt?”

It feels more like being alive than Cassian has known in six months.  He’s assigned to the second wave of forces backing up one of the insurgencies, in charge of a team of Signallers and Signals Engineers, and in the middle of the fighting he suddenly finds himself thinking _When I get back to base, I’m going to speak to Draven about getting back into Intelligence work…_

They might, finally, incredibly, have a chance at last.  But Palpatine may have a designated heir hidden away somewhere; and even without that, chances are the Empire will rally, they’ll want to go down fighting.  Good Intel could shorten the conflict significantly at this stage, could save lives and avoid destruction in countless systems.  It’s time he was doing his job again.

If they win, it won’t undo everything that has been lost.  It can’t restore the dead or heal the tortured, can’t bring back the missing, can’t mend all the broken lives in the galaxy.  But it will give a kind of meaning to the deaths and the broken faith, the lost hopes.

The battle for Corsolina is quick and terrifying.  The troops move on to the southern continent, to meet up with local forces.  Within a matter of days they are merely mopping up isolated handfuls of Imperials, and Einithion is free.

His battalion is due to be moved on again quickly, to the next planet crying out for liberation.  But the huge prison-industrial complexes of the south turn out to have held countless POWs as well as political prisoners of every race imaginable and on his last morning planetside he finds himself reading an appeal for volunteers to serve on the repatriation programme.  A short posting, three to four weeks at the most.  Helping lives that can be mended, literally thousands of them. 

He thinks of that mending.  Somewhere, somehow, someone might be doing the same for Jyn.

On impulse, Cassian requests to be re-assigned to the repatriation team.

**

“Fill this in with your name and other details, please – thank you - can you fill this in, please? – your name, home planet, next of kin, it shouldn’t take long – thank you – yes, with these details we can start trying to get people home – thank you, ma’am – yes, we have a voice-activated version – Corporal Maddock, do you have one of the – thanks – here you are – that’s right, as many of the categories as you can – good morning, please would you fill in your name and personal details on this data pad –“

It’s shattering work, exhausting physically and mentally.  He’s been off the regime of stims and sedatives for two months now, and his sleep patterns have begun to normalise; working in repatriations is enough to finish the job.  Cassian sleeps the moment he lies down each night, flat on his aching back on a mattress in the repurposed school hall the team are using as a headquarters.  The lights go out, and so does he.  He doesn’t even remember his dreams.

In the mornings, they roll up their bedding, set up tables above the sleeping mats, and open the doors. 

The ex-prisoners are being housed in the departmental buildings of the University of Einithion.  They flood in, each day, busloads of them coming from three dozen different sites all around the capital.  They’ve slept in student halls, in gyms and refectories, on the benches of lecture theatres and the floors of labs.  They are surprisingly orderly and patient, even optimistic in the main, though many are exhausted and embittered, shell-shocked as much at being free again as from their years of imprisonment.

Half his time is spent in front-facing work and the rest in the back-house team handling the logistics of feeding and supplying everyone.  Over six thousand individuals, needing adequate and reliable food and water supplies, and provision of bedding and hygiene facilities appropriate to their various species.  Getting them medical help, clothing, specialist translation services, providing access to comms networks, notifying authorities on newly-liberated worlds.  The work feels endless, and every bit of it is vital. 

Every one of these lives, he can keep faith with, and he does.

**

“Captain Andor, sir?  It’s your break.”

Cassian has just shaken hands with a thin, pale Corellian political prisoner, after an emotional interview that over-ran by nearly an hour.  He’s been barely aware of the crowds and the noise all around, gripped and moved by the older man’s tale of suffering, his struggle to remember basic family information after years of solitary confinement. 

Cresfa Maddock’s voice sounds as though she has been waiting for a while to speak to him. 

He looks up at her with an apologetic grin.  “What time is it, Corporal?”

“Almost two.”

“Force, no wonder I’m hungry.”  He levers himself up carefully, stretching; groans as his spine and shoulder blades click.  “I’ll see you in twenty.”

“You take your full break, sir, I’ll be fine.”

“Did you have yours yet?”

“Yes, sir, I’m good. Please, get in back and have something to eat.”  The Corporal settles into his vacated seat.  “Go on, sir, off you go.”  She smiles to soften the cheek of that.  “There’s soup and tea and a bread delivery just came in.” 

“Sounds good.” 

The doorway into the kitchens is forty metres away down the side of the packed hall.  Cassian makes his way past groups of humans and other species.  His back clicks again and he stops to stretch and flex the aching muscles, the wrenching pain like a vice in his spine.  A Drabatan in a too-large shirt looks up from where they’re sitting on the floor and says “You okay?” in a friendly voice.

“Yeah.  It’s an old injury, I get stiff sometimes.  Thanks.”  He remembers Pao, and smiles at the toothy grin below him.  Rolls his shoulders once more and walks on.  There’s a cart up ahead, crowds gathering round it, collecting supplies of food and drink; another Drabatan is coming back his way, carrying a couple of mugs of steaming tea.  He steps aside to let them go past and rejoin their comrade.  Looks around at the seething mass of living people. 

They’ve already assisted over a thousand and arranged transportation to eight planets.  It’s work to be proud of, and clear proof that organisation doesn’t have to mean the iron grip of Empire; organisation can be utterly chaotic, full of cheerful voices shouting to one another, and weary dirty people sitting waiting without resentment or fear, sleeping on floors, eating whatever can be found for them. 

There are four women sitting in a little group by the door he’s headed for, chewing on bread rolls with yellow paan-seed on top and chatting happily.  One is huge, with pale green skin and small horns; one is a short skinny Togruta carrying what looks like a swaddled baby cuddled against her shoulder.  The other two are human, a graceful black girl barely more than a child, wearing a ragged camouflage shirt, and a short white woman who has her back to him.  Her brown hair is worn screwed into a messy bun on the nape of her neck. 

It’s the way Jyn used to wear her hair.  He smiles at the sudden thought that maybe right now, somewhere, Jyn is also sitting eating, that she is also able to hope again; that somewhere she might be among friends, seeing freedom come. 

He almost looks away, because the thought is too sad a happiness to bear looking at for long.

And then the woman turns, and it is her.

She doesn’t see him at first and he is frozen, standing in the middle of the crowd, staring at her profile and swaying in shock with one hand upraised, halfway to rubbing his stiff neck.  His mouth opens, his lips frame her name dumbly.  He hasn’t the power to utter a sound.

She’s grinning at something one of her friends has just said. 

It can’t be her, it can’t be; but it is.  But it can’t be. 

“Jyn…” It comes out in a croak.  He swallows and wets his lips and tries again.  Gasps for breath, feels as though he’s dying as he raises his voice and shouts hoarsely “Jyn!”

She looks round and gapes and almost falls over.  Rocks forward onto her hands and gets up, she’s awkward and ungainly with haste, she’s stumbling through the gaggle of bodies, holding her hands out to him.  Her expression a twisting mask of astonishment and tears.  He pushes past someone’s shoulders, climbs right over another prisoner, meets her in a sudden space that appears as people draw back instinctively from their urgent clumsy progress.  She says “Ah, ah, oh” and then “Cassian, Cassian, _Cassian_!” and he’s in her arms.

A long, desperate gasp as they both breathe again. 

Her face presses into his shoulder, hot breath and then hot tears on his skin.  His voice is still stubbornly jammed in his throat, he can only crush her close and tighten his grip in the fabric of her vest.  All the hopes he’s had to keep held back, unable to let go or to find peace, all the hopes sustaining and torturing him, all these months, and now it’s over.  Jyn alive, Jyn holding him, locking herself round him, whimpering inarticulately. 

She starts to draw back and then leans into him again, burying her face in his shirt.  In a tiny whisper she says “You’re alive.”

He finds an equally small scrap of his own voice.

“Jyn, Jyn, oh, my dear…”

“You’re alive.  I’ve had to fight so hard not to think about it.  You’re _alive_.”

“I’m so sorry, I’m _so sorry_ , I should have come for you, Jyn I’m so –“

“If I’d been anywhere else I would have tried to get back to you, I would have –“

“I got your message, _Lianno_ , I saw it but I was too late, I didn’t know where to look, I’ve been hoping and praying for some kind of clue, I’m so sorry –“

“I would have tried but I just had to stay alive and there was no way out, I had to make myself not think about you, I’m _so sorry_ –“

Both of them are gabbling and crying, and he suddenly hears what she’s saying.  She would have tried to get back to him.  She made herself not think about him, she’s sorry, she’s sorry...

He should have tried to find her.  He made himself wait and search for clues instead.  He’s sorry.

How useless and stupid the words are, and the guilt, now that she’s alive and safe and back with him, and he’s back with her.  She’s raising her head again and looking up at him, and she says “Oh, you’ve got so _thin_!” and puts her hands to either side of his face, wiping at his wet cheeks with her fingertips. 

The words still keep coming out, it’s as if he can’t say anything else. “Oh Jyn, I’m so sorry, I should have been with you, I’m so sorry!”

“Hush, hush, Cassian, hush…”

He slowly starts to take in details; her stance, clumsy and slightly stiff as if her lower back is paining her; the way her body feels thicker somehow though her collar bones are prominent, almost gaunt in the neckline of the vest.  There are bruises and cuts on her face and down the whole of one bare arm.  “You’ve been fighting.”

“You know me,” she says with a quaver of something like humour. “There was a rebellion, so –“ and then she breaks off and “Oh, Cassian, Cassian…  Oh, my dear.  Come with me, come this way, there’s - there’s something you need to know, you need to meet –“

He can’t bear to let her get more than a few inches away; he hangs on to her as she turns, lets himself move with her, in her wake, back to her friends.  They are all looking up at him, smiling, with breadcrumbs and seeds scattered on their clothing and across the floor around them. 

He manages a small, uncoordinated wave, mouths _Hi_ in the general direction of their delight.  Holding Jyn, living breathing Jyn pinned against his side.

Until she pulls away and crouches beside the Togruta female, and holds out her arms, very gently, reaching for the swaddled bundle on the woman’s shoulder.

Cassian’s breath stops altogether for a moment. 

The infant is not Togruta.  It has a full head of thick dark brown hair. 

Jyn lifts it up tenderly, he’s never seen such tenderness, nothing in his entire life has ever prepared him for this. 

He catches a glimpse of a round cheek, an infolded sleeping face with a pointed chin and a ridiculous nose.  A tiny hand, smaller than a butterfly; delicate brown fingers bunched in fists beside a downturned mouth. 

Jyn settles the infant in the crook of her left arm and bends to kiss the smooth forehead, the toy-like hands and silky hair.  She looks up at him and her expression for a heart-breaking moment is afraid.  Then she smiles.   Gently.  Uncertainly. 

He has to breathe, his right hand is flapping in the air looking for something to hold on to, he thinks his knees are going to give way but they don’t and he’s still standing, and he hears himself say “Uh” in an undignified squeak.  “Oh, Jyn, oh no, oh Jyn, I should have been with you –“

She’s getting up carefully, he can’t recall ever seeing her move so carefully.  The child’s fingers uncurl slowly and touch the air.   She takes a step, two steps, back to his side.   

“That’s a lot of hair,” he manages to say.  He can’t stop staring.

“Yes, it is.”

“Oh, Jyn – oh, my Jyn, what have you had to go through, Jyn, are you okay?  Are you – are you both okay?“ “

She makes a face for a second.  “It wasn’t bad, as prisons go.  I’ve been in worse.  We’re fine.  He’s a very good baby.  Very patient.”  She’s right next to him again now, lifting the child up between them, asleep in her arms, so small, so _incredibly_ small.  A little human life.  “He puts up with a lot.  His mama fighting all the time –“  Her cautious grin is so perfect it’s painful to see. 

“I should have been with you, I’m so sorry –“

“You’re here now.  We’re all here.  We can’t say everything right now, we’ve got time to talk another day, please don’t try to - Look – look, he’s waking up.  Do you want to hold him?”

The brown eyes staring up at him seem enormous in that tiny face.  Deep and familiar, looking right at him as if aware of every detail, who he is, all he’s done, all he will do.

“How – how old is he?”

“Ten days.  Here…”  She holds the baby up, and it takes just the smallest movement, to reach out, to touch the round skull under the silky hair, to let his hands fold round the little body. 

“Oh – oh, little one, little man…”  Such a light weight in his arms, it’s almost nothing and it’s the weight of a whole life.  Those doll-like fingers moving, that red mouth yawning.  When he touches a fingertip to the child’s hand it is grasped instantly.  How can something so small have such a grip?  His heart is pinned by those tiny fingers, he’s locked to the spot, he cannot move. “Hello, little one…”

“I wanted to name him after you,” Jyn says quietly after a moment “But it felt like bad luck, like doing something in your memory.  I couldn’t let myself think about the possibility you might not have made it off Hoth.  So I didn’t call him Cassian. I hope that’s not a problem.”  She has that _it-better-not-be_ look on her face for a second, that he loves to distraction and had thought he would never see again.  “His name is Jeron.  I’ve always liked your middle name anyway, so…”

“It was my father’s name.”

She rubs a hand in the small of his back gently, and his son stares at him thoughtfully and yawns again, and hiccups, in the middle of the great hall of refugees and prisoners, surrounded by all the hope of the galaxy, and what feels like most of its loudest noises as well.  And there they are.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I read somewhere that from the battle of Hoth to the battle of Endor is around six months. I've based this on that time-line.


End file.
